SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA - News), the worldwide leader in programmable
graphics processor technologies, and Havok, the game industry's leading supplier
of cross- platform middleware, will be demonstrating a physics effects solution
that runs completely on a graphics processing unit (GPU) -- an industry first --
at this year's Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California (March
21st through 24th).

The result of an ongoing engineering collaboration between Havok and NVIDIA,
this new software product from Havok -- called Havok FX(TM) -- enables the
simulation of dramatically-detailed physical phenomena in PC games, when powered
by GPUs such as NVIDIA GeForceŽ7 or 6 Series GPUs and further amplified with
NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU technology. The Havok FX product is currently in early
release to select developers and is expected to be available this
summer.

I see a lot of people saying that this will kill PhysX, but I beg to differ.

The problem with the first dedicated physics card is that the market for it is tiny. Game developers can't make games that require it because few people will have one, so the initial uses for it will be just a bit of added glitz. I want it to become prevalent due to the long-term benefits, but it seems like a hard sell even to me.

But if nVidia can add hardware-accelerated physics with nothing more than a driver update, suddenly there's a vast customer base with hardware-accelerated physics already in their machine. That means developers actually have a market to develop for, and the hardest problem for PhysX is suddenly solved by someone else! (provided the two approaches are sufficiently compatible).

So 'all' the PhysX guys have to do is create a superior solution.

The games will come, and if CPU+GPU+PPU gives you better performance than just CPU+GPU then people will buy that PPU.

edit: oops, I see that Beamer actually said a lot of this already.This comment was edited on Mar 20, 19:57.